Snowden, Through the Eyes of a Spy Novelist

FOR a spy novelist like me, the Edward J. Snowden story has everything. A man driven by ego and idealism — can anyone ever distinguish the two? — leaves his job and his beautiful girlfriend behind. He must tell the world the Panopticon has arrived. His masters vow to punish him, and he heads for Moscow in a desperate search for refuge. In reality he’s found the world’s most dangerous place to be a dissident, where power is a knife blade and a sprinkle of polonium. For now he’s safe. He’s of use to his new Russian friends. But if they change their minds ...

I wish I’d written it.

But Mr. Snowden is real, not a character. And I am sorry to watch his true life unraveling.

Two weeks ago his case had a whiff of farce. Despite all the huggle-muggle about his initial revelations, anyone who has been paying attention knows that the National Security Agency is colonoscopy-deep in the world’s electronic communications. In my novels, characters assume that every e-mail they send will be seen and every phone call heard.

What Mr. Snowden at first seemed to want — and rightly — was to force our electronic spies to answer, in plain English, are you saving e-mails, Skype and other Internet communications? What about phone calls? For how long? Who can get access to this data, and is a warrant required in each case? How are calls between Americans treated? Et cetera. Despite many promises of disclosure from the White House, the answers to all those questions remain murky.

So Mr. Snowden seemed to have done the world a service. But in the last week both he and his former employers have misplayed their hands, and his story has become far trickier. Mr. Snowden did not start out as a spy, and calling him one bends the term past recognition. Spies don’t give their secrets to journalists for free.

Did he think he would be seen as a hero? Maybe. At least, as The Times’s Keith Bradsher reported Monday, he seems to have believed he would be allowed to stay quietly in Hong Kong while the world digested his revelations.

Given the Obama administration’s record of pursuing leakers, Mr. Snowden’s plans to live happily ever after were optimistic, at best. In fact, the fury from Washington and the intelligence community knew no bounds. Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, a late if enthusiastic convert to the antiterrorism cause, called Mr. Snowden a “defector.” Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said Mr. Snowden had committed “treason.” Federal prosecutors prepared a sealed (naturally) indictment. The White House asked Hong Kong to repatriate Snowden — and, unbelievably, seemed to think its extradition request would be handled like any other. We’ll just fax the papers, and you ship him to county, O.K., sheriff?

Faced with the prospect of decades in prison, Mr. Snowden panicked. Instead of waiting for the territory or its masters in Beijing to decide his fate, he packed his laptops and headed for Moscow. Now he gets to see a soft dictatorship (such a lovely phrase) up close. On Sunday, the willful naïfs from WikiLeaks who are “helping” Mr. Snowden said that Sheremetyevo airport would simply be a stopover. But why would the Russian government let him go before it has squeezed him dry? In interviews, Mr. Snowden has said he has plenty of secrets left on his hard drives, and there’s no reason to doubt him. He has already disclosed details of American and British spying on a conference in 2009 in London.

Mr. Snowden has put himself in a terrible spot. Moscow will surely protect him for as long as it feels like irritating Washington. But by the time the Russians are finished sifting through his laptops, he’ll be their spy, whether or not he meant to be. Beijing may have already pulled the same trick; some intelligence officers believe that Chinese spy agencies copied Mr. Snowden’s hard drives during his Hong Kong stay.

We have treated a whistle-blower like a traitor — and thus made him a traitor. Great job. Did anyone in the White House or the N.S.A or the C.I.A. consider flying to Hong Kong and treating Mr. Snowden like a human being, offering him a chance to testify before Congress and a fair trial? Maybe he would have gone with President Vladimir V. Putin anyway, but at least he would have had another option. The secret keepers would have won too: a Congressional hearing would have been a small price to bring Mr. Snowden and those precious hard drives back to American soil.

It’s hard not to see the last couple of weeks as a tragedy for Mr. Snowden — who seems to have started down this road with decent motives and is now looking at life as an exile or in prison — as well as a huge self-inflicted wound for the American intelligence community. If the masters of the apparatus were really ready to have an honest discussion about their powers, Mr. Snowden might have wound up not in Moscow, but back in Washington, his girl by his side on the Capitol steps, headed for a few years in prison and then a job with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

That would have been the Hollywood ending. Real life is tougher.

Alex Berenson, a former reporter for The New York Times, is the author of seven novels, including “The Faithful Spy,” winner of the Edgar Award. His most recent novel is “The Night Ranger.”